Diversity & Inclusion Friday news round-up: June 1, 2018

Welcome to the latest edition of our Diversity & Inclusion Friday news round up. Today we are talking about Roseanne’s racist tweet, gender bias in the US military, a Swedish cantata against homophobia and Lookout, a new app Google is currently working on. Happy Friday!

Jun 01, 2018

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Gender Bias

Researchers from Harvard University / United States Naval Academy and War College looked at language and gender bias in over 80000 performance evaluations of students from the Naval Academy. The military is obviously a traditionally male environment, but there has been an increased effort to overcome this and provide equal opportunities. While there were no gender differences in objective measures (e.g. grades, fitness test), the researchers found that managers used significantly more negative attributes for women than they used for men.

Inclusion & Tech

Google is currently developing a new app called Lookout. The app will help blind and visually impaired people to become more independent by informing them about their environment, e.g. stairs in front of them, reading signs etc. There is no release date yet, but Google said it will come to the Play Store later this year.

Racism

“Racism is not a known side effect of any medication”. The pharma company Sanofi released this statement as a response to actor Roseanne Barr blaming a sleeping pill for her racist tweet. Earlier this week, the popular show “Roseanne” was cancelled with immediate effect by ABC after Roseanne sent a tweet that compared former Obama adviser Valerie Jarrett to an ape.

LGBTQ

When a Swedish Symphony Orchestra from Helsingborg received homophobic hate mail after performing music from LGBTQ composers, they were unable to respond as it came from an anonymous sender – so they decided to turn it into music and wrote a cantata!

ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTOR

Caroline Berns is the Head of Talent Acquisition for Ericsson Middle East & Africa. Born in Germany, she lived in the US and various countries in Europe until 2012, when she moved to South Africa.

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